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For my required assignment this week, I had to take an existing picture and change the environment in which it was happening. For me, this assignment was more of a learning process than anything else. First I had to take the original image (which is a picture of 3 of my friends) and remove the background. I used a mixture of the magic eraser and background eraser tools in Photoshop to do this. This was tough though because the magic eraser makes a kind of educated guess about what is actually the background. If your background is not pure white, it will usually make a mistake somewhere. So next I had to use the regular eraser and zoom in very close to the image to remove all the stuff that the magic eraser could not get. Next I put something different in the background and that’s about it! In this case I thought it would be funny to have something in the background that you would not expect. I was searching around and found this pic where the bear looked like he was waving and thought it was perfect! In the future I may not use the magic eraser at all. You can see where it deleted his hand a bit and avoiding the magic eraser would alleviate this issue. My friends were posing for a picture and now they have a visitor in the background!

This assignment really peaked my interest. I’ve always lived by a motto that is very special to me: “Day By Day”. Most of my personality is really centered around this idea. When I wake up every day, I have until midnight to worry about. I deal with the things that I can in that amount of time. I need not stress about something happening days or months from now. If you are stressing out, start with what you can do now until the end of the day. Then start it up again tomorrow. So for this assignment, I chose to use that as my tattoo. I went online and looked for a font that I like. I picked the one called Absolute. I liked the flowing nature of it while at the same time being bold with the lines. This is what I would get if it was a tattoo.

Next I added another layer in Photoshop and tried out some different colored backgrounds and the result is pretty interesting. The red one adds a edge to it. It makes it rather dark and mysterious. The blue makes it very calming and peaceful. The green is bright and cheerful. And finally the black has almost an adverse effect to the original image. It is overwhelmingly dark and really isn’t very upbringing.

Overall, this was a very fun assignment. And who knows, maybe I’ll have to head downtown to Sorry Mom and get this one done!

Reading this was quite the eye opener for me as I am very new to design and this week has helped to show me so many things that I have never noticed. While exploring part one of the booklet, I realized these are the sort of backbones of design. The intangibles are aspects that without them, you have terrible design. So many of these things go into design that we take for granted every day such as subway maps. Visual power and intellectual elegance were two of the most impactful aspects in my opinion. Visual power draws the reader/viewer in and peaks their interest in what you are designing. Intellectual elegance keeps the viewer intrigued/amazed. Here you can really show off your intelligence when designing something and leave the viewer amazed. Part two is the secondary, but still necessary, part of design. This section involves the materials or practices of design. I believe these aspects are slightly less important than part one but still necessary. One thing that was super surprising to me was the paper A-sizes diagram on page 38. The grid section was also very interesting. I never realized that so much of the things we see day to day are built off of some sort of grid system. The way the letters were laid out on the grid made it very orderly and clean. I had no clue that was how they all fit together, and really makes a lot of sense when you think about it! Even though it was a little dated, I thought this reading was super helpful to my understanding of design principles. It gave me an appreciation for thinking about the design first, and laying it out second. It will definitely make my design blitz a lot easier and much more impactful.

This week was quite an eye opener when it came to digital storytelling. It was amazing to me how many outlets there were for telling stories and how great they all are.

Setting up my domain and social media was one of the more fun parts of the week. I love getting new things so getting all these new accounts for us to use was very fun. The website made it very easy to select a domain and tie WordPress to it.

Customizing my blog was definitely one of the bigger highlights. Building a website and tailoring it to my interests was very fun to me. I got full control over how I want it to look and what will be where. Plus, it is always a work in progress so it will be ever-changing.

I am kinda sad that this was the first topic of our session. As I said in my introduction, I love photography so this week was very fun for me. Taking pictures and sharing them was amazing. The weeks assignments were not difficult from a computational stand point but they definitely challenged me along with the quick pace. I learned some things through the articles that we had to look at so that was nice. The setup of all of this was very seamless. All of the websites we used made it very easy to get through everything. The only thing I really struggled with was making a youtube introduction, because I have never done any video related things before. But I’m guessing that will change as we move forward! I’m excited to see what is in store for next week but it will be hard to top this week!